It can be argued that in 2008, President-elect Obama’s victory included a significant element of luck, including the timing of the economic meltdown and John McCain’s disastrous veep pick. So too, it can be argued that Trump’s Electoral College win/popular vote loss in 2016 threaded a lucky path through the rust belt.

President Obama did a good job of making the most of his short-lived congressional majorities and produced one historic reform, the Affordable Care Act, which provided health security for additional millions of Americans, and he was able to enact a few other well-received legislative accomplishments, including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Looking forward to Trump’s presidency and his congressional majorities, it’s hard to see any positive reforms on the horizon. So far all of the Republican talk, and all of Trump’s appointments, have been about undoing Obama’s legislative accomplishments, as if that alone was somehow a great achievement.

Despite Trump’s bloated reputation as a “builder,” no one expects him to actually build much, since he is now waffling on the infrastructure upgrades. No one in GOP Land can identify any concrete plans to better prepare Americans for a new era of prosperity. There are no job-training measures in the Republican legislative hopper, for example, no projects or proposals for innovation that anyone can get excited about.

Instead, it’s all about, “boy, we can’t wait to undo Obama’s reforms.” Trump and the Republicans can only milk that tired cow for so long, before their voters start wondering, like Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” At that point, Trump and his fellow Republicans become an awfully inviting target for disgruntled voters who expected something…more.

At slate.com Jamelle Bouie points out that Trump and the GOP are not really in good shape to weather such growing doubts, despite all of the pundit crowing about Republican strength in the House and state houses. As Bouie writes,

…Neither Trump nor congressional Republicans are as strong as they appear. Both enter the field with severe disadvantages, and both risk overplaying the hands that they have. Democrats are on the defensive, but the conditions are there for pushback and resurgence.

“If Mr. Trump’s strategy to keep jobs in America relies on busting unions, keeping wages down, deregulating everything in sight and cutting taxes for the wealthy, he’ll certainly fail…If President-elect Trump is serious about building a high-productivity, high-wage economy, he needs to put a moratorium on flawed trade agreements and crack down on unfair trade practices, and he must work to end all tax subsidies for offshoring and put those and other revenues toward funding quality education, skills and infrastructure investment….” – from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s NYT op-ed, “Don’t Let Trump Speak for Workers.”

At The Atlantic, Alana Semuels argues “It’s Not About the Economy: In an increasingly polarized country, even economic progress can’t get voters to abandon their partisan allegiance.” As Semuels observes, “…in an increasingly polarized country, an improving economy is not enough to get Republicans to vote for Democrats, in part because they don’t give Democrats any credit for fixing the economy. Gallup, for instance, found that while just 16 percent of Republicans said they thought the economy was getting better in the week leading up to the election, 49 percent said they thought it was getting better in the week after the election…These biases are only increasing as the country becomes increasingly polarized. As people become increasingly loyal to their parties, they are unlikely to give leaders from the other party credit for much of anything positive. Both sides are instead more likely to believe narratives that suggest that the other party has only made things worse.”

At The Observer’s opinion page, Robert Lehrman, a former speechwriter for Al Gore and author of The Political Speechwriter’s Companion, writes “Democrats, let’s not be shy about admitting the truth: we want a one-term President. Denying we feel that way is as believable as the way we pretended shock at McConnell’s candor six years ago. Democrats will almost certainly lose Senate seats in 2018. But done right, a steady, unyielding McConnell-like campaign, leavened with compromise as they did, can win back voters we should have captured this time…Let them call us obstructionists. We don’t have to agree with Mitch McConnell’s views. We just have to learn from his example.”

Emma Green explains why “Democrats Have a Religion Problem” in her interview at The Atlantic with Michael Wear, a former Obama White House staffer, on the topic of “the party’s illiteracy on and hostility toward faith.” Charlie Cook also addresses the subject in his interview with ‘Meet the Press Daily,’ noting, “Democrats don’t know how to talk to a lot of these people that go to church, people of value. The Democratic party has become a secular party.”

At New York Magazine Ed Kilgore explains “Here’s How Obama Could Go Nuclear on Trump and the GOP Before Leaving Office” by making ‘recess appointments of scores of federal judges up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court seat vacated by deceased Justice Scalia. There are reasons why it is unlikely to happen, including Obama’s temperament. But it’s not like the Republicans can credibly attack  Democrats for bucking bipartisan comity and playing hardball. As Kilgore concludes, “..I wouldn’t rule it out entirely before the new Congress is gaveled in.”

Sam Wang’s “Constitutional Hardball: Can Senate Democrats Confirm Merrick Garland on January 3rd?” explores the idea further at The Princeton Election Consortium. Calling it a “long shot,” Wang says “A bigger hurdle is whether Democrats have the boldness to attempt such a move. To some extent, party members adopt their tone from their leaders. Senate Democrats might have to push back on President Obama, who has made it clear that he seeks to make an orderly transition to the Trump Administration. But the roughness of the Presidential transition may give him second thoughts. Democrats may be bolstered by the fact that Obama’s net approval is quite high, while Trump’s net approval rating is the lowest of any incoming President on record.”

It seems possible, at least, that Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham is going to raise some serious hell about Putin’s meddling in U.S. politics. As Theodore Schleifer reports at CNN, quoting Graham, “There are 100 United States senators. Amy Klobuchar is on this trip with us. She’s a Democrat from Minnesota. I would say that 99 of us believe the Russians did this and we’re going to do something about it,” said Graham, who is planning a hearing with McCain on Russia’s interference with US elections. “We’re going to put sanctions together that hit Putin as an individual and his inner circle for interfering in our election, and they’re doing it all over the world — not just in the United States.”

Josh Katz has a fun post up at NYT’ The Upshot, “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs. ‘Modern Family’:50 Maps of the U.S. Cultural Divide.” It’s also an excellent resource for political ad buyers, because it indicates exactly where such TV shows and many others are popular. A lot of the popularity maps are predictable enough, but you might be surprised to learn that “The Walking Dead” is very big along the Texas-Mexico border, while “Game of Thrones” doesn’t do very well outside of narrowly-defined cities and “The Tonight Show’s” largest area of popularity is in north-central Utah. In PA, you would book some ads on “Dancing with the Stars,” “NCIS” and “Law and Order: SVU.” On the Pine Ridge reservation in SD, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” rules and “Saturday Night Live’s” strongest southern metro area is Nashville.

John Nichols has a welcome spirit-lifter at The Nation, “The 2016 Progressive Honor Roll: Yes, it’s been an awful year. But the untold story is that grassroots activists have actually frequently prevailed.”

At NPR Linda Wertheimer interviews Nick Rathod, executive director of the State Innovation Exchange (SIX), which fights for progressive causes and candidates in state houses across America. Rathod notes that”one of the things that progressives have done…is that we try to pass big pieces of legislation here in D.C. and then educate everyone on the back end where conservatives have developed policies that are tailored to local communities and then have the conversation and build narratives around what that means for people. I mean, I grew up in Nebraska, and when I talk with my conservative friends there, we’re pretty close on a lot of the issues. But the thing is that we just haven’t ever really sat down and talked to people about what it – what equal pay actually means. You know, do you care whether your daughter gets paid the same as your son? I think most people would say yeah. Do you care that people have a living wage, that people who are playing by the rules, working hard, I think people would say yes to that. Let’s have those conversations locally, and let’s shake out who is actually fighting for those things.”

Here is some good post-election news for progressives, as reported by Joanna Walters at The Guardian:  “From smaller local organizations to household names such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, nonprofit organizations across the US reported fundraising tallies many magnitudes higher than in previous years as they approached their end-of-year donation drives…Progressive causes in the US saw a spike in donations immediately after the election on 8 November from voters dismayed, outraged or even frightened by the outcome. In the weeks since, this wave of strategic giving has compounded. Planned Parenthood has received more than 300,000 donations in the six weeks since the election, 40 times its normal rate. Around half the donors were millennials and 70% had never given to the family planning organization before, a spokesman told the Guardian.”

Gene B. Sperling, director of the National Economic Council from 1996 to 2001 and from 2011 until 2014, has a New York Times op-ed, “The Quiet War on Medicaid,” focusing on a looming crisis Ed Kilgore flagged at New York Magazone back on December 1st. As Sperling writes, “if Democrats focus too much of their attention on Medicare, they may inadvertently assist the quieter war on Medicaid — one that could deny health benefits to millions of children, seniors, working families and people with disabilities…Of the two battles, the Republican effort to dismantle Medicaid is more certain. Neither Mr. Trump nor Senate Republicans may have the stomach to fully own the political risks of Medicare privatization. But not only have Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Tom Price, Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, made proposals to deeply cut Medicaid through arbitrary block grants or “per capita caps,” during the campaign, Mr. Trump has also proposed block grants.”

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich discusses Donad Trump’s “7 Techniques to Control the Media” in a ‘Democracy Now’ interview with Amy Goodman. Discussing one of the points, Reich observes, “Donald Trump has, almost from the beginning of his campaign, and certainly in the—and he’s continued it—in the post-election period, to denigrate and berate the media. He holds rallies, and he talks about the dishonest media. He uses adjectives like “scum” and “scoundrel” to describe the media. He picks out individual members of the press who have criticized him, and talks about them in very critical terms or mocks them. This is not the habit of a democratic—democratically elected president…We’ve never before had a president or president-elect who has taken the media on so directly and so negatively and tried to plant in the public’s mind—and I think this is the real danger, Amy—trying to plant in the public’s mind the notion that the press is the enemy itself.” Video of entire interview here.

The debate about the substance of the best Democratic message will continue on through the next few elections. As for the best message vehicle, here’s a clue: “So what medium really is a primary news source for the largest number of Americans? We can find an answer to that in a different Pew Research report, this one from June, titled, “The Modern News Consumer.” It compares the percentage of U.S. adults who “often” get news from various platforms. By this metric, television remains the dominant medium by a significant margin, at 57 percent. A distant second is “online,” at 38 percent. This combines the 18 percent who get news often from social media with an overlapping 28 percent who get it often from “news websites/apps.” Third on the list is radio at 25 percent, followed by print newspapers at 20 percent.” from “How Many People Really Get Their News From Facebook?” by Will Oremus at slate.com.

Michael Moore’s assertion that Trump was going to “get us all killed” seems a little less of an overstatement in the wake of Trump’s tweet last week that that the U.S. should “greatly strengthen and expand” its nuclear capability.” In their syndicated column on “The chaos theory of Donald Trump: Washington Post analysis,” John Wagnern and Abby Phillip share a chilling quote about it by a foreign policy expert: “We’re just operating in this world where you cannot believe the things he says,” said Eliot Cohen, a foreign policy expert and former George W. Bush administration official at the State Department. “It will have large consequences for our allies and our adversaries, and it’s going to greatly magnify the danger of miscalculation by all kinds of people.” It’s one thing for Trump to be a ‘bomb-thrower’ in his domestic policy tweets, without regard for the consequences. But loose talk about escalating the nuclear arms race is a much more dangerous kind of foolishness. The top foreign policy pros should ask for a meeting with Trump at the earliest opportunity, to at least try to get him to stop tweeting about the arms race.

Greg Sargent adds to this concern in his Plum Line post, “Could Trump help unleash nuclear catastrophe with a single tweet?,” noting “Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, points out that in peacetime, any belligerent Trump Tweet about nuclear weapons might not appear as alarming, simply because “confirmation bias” might lead key actors not to interpret it in its most frightening light at that moment. Amid rising international tensions, though, that confirmation bias might work in the other direction, he says…“Imagine we’re in a crisis — if he recklessly Tweets, people could read these things in the worst possible light,” Lewis tells me. “The North Koreans have a plan to use nuclear weapons very early in a conflict. They’re not going to wait around. If they think we are going, they’re going to use nuclear weapons against South Korea and Japan.””

Nate Cohn shares some revealing data at The Upshot: “The exit polls also show all of the signs that Mr. Trump was winning over Obama voters. Perhaps most strikingly, Mr. Trump won 19 percent of white voters without a degree who approved of Mr. Obama’s performance, including 8 percent of those who “strongly” approved of Mr. Obama’s performance and 10 percent of white working-class voters who wanted to continue Mr. Obama’s policies…Mr. Trump won 20 percent of self-identified liberal white working-class voters, according to the exit polls, and 38 percent of those who wanted policies that were more liberal than Mr. Obama’s…Taken together, Mr. Trump’s views on immigration, trade, China, crime, guns and Islam all had considerable appeal to white working-class Democratic voters, according to Pew Research data. It was a far more appealing message than old Republican messages about abortion, same-sex marriage and the social safety net.”

At The Jacobin Seth Ackerman’s “A Blueprint for a New Party” includes a critique of the Democratic Party, arguing in essence that it is neither Democratic, nor a Party. Ackerman is not interested in improving the Democratic Party. But he offers several interesting observations, among them: “It’s true that a number of sincere, committed leftists, or at least progressives, run for office on the Democratic ballot line at all levels of American politics. Sometimes they even win. And all else equal, we’re better off with such politicians in office than without them…But electing individual progressives does little to change the broad dynamics of American politics or American capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of placebo effect: sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring the fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect working-class interests. “Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal office-seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others, including progressives, must respond…In this “party-less” model of politics, it’s the Democratic politician who goes about trying to recruit a base, rather than the other way around. The politician’s platform and message are devised by her and her alone…Start with the most fundamental fact about the Democratic Party: it has no members…fundraising letters aside, there are no real members of the Democratic Party: “Unlike these [British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand] democracies, where members join a political party through a process of application to the party itself, party membership in the United States has been described as ‘a fiction created by primary registration laws.”

A New York Times op-ed by Stanley B. Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, “Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats?” takes a nuanced look at the President’s political legacy: “President Obama will be remembered as a thoughtful and dignified president who led a scrupulously honest administration that achieved major changes…People argue over whether his impatience with politicians and Republican intransigence denied him bigger accomplishments, but that argument is beside the point: He rescued an economy in crisis and passed the recovery program, pulled America back from its military overreach, passed the Affordable Care Act and committed the nation to addressing climate change. To be truly transformative in the way he wanted, however, his success had to translate into electoral gains for those who shared his vision and wanted to reform government. On that count, Mr. Obama failed…His legacy regrettably includes the more than 1,000 Democrats who lost their elections during his two terms. Republicans now have total control in half of America’s states.”

Aropos of all of the discussion about whether or not Democrats should marshall resources to win back the white working-class, think on these stats from Guy Molyneux’s post, “Mapping the White Working Class: A deep dive into the beliefs and sentiments of the moderates among them“at The American Prospect: “Boosting white non-college moderates’ support for Clinton by just 5 percent or 6 percent would have delivered her the presidency. Democrats can lose the votes of every one of the 36 percent who are uneasy with America’s increasing diversity, and still make the progress required to win elections.”

Everybody is a quarterback on Monday morning, but it’s unlikely that all of Cenk Uygur’s points in the video below are wrong. Despite the cherry-picked unflattering photo on the cover, this video critique merits both serious consideration and a point-by-point rebuttal, where it’s needed:

From The Nation, here’s “Here’s an Organizing Strategy to Revive the Democratic Party That Doesn’t Depend on White Voters: Many Democrats assume it’s impossible to get more people of color to vote. That’s just not true” By Steve Phillips. “Clinton lost Michigan by 11,000 votes. Of those black folks in Michigan who did vote, 92 percent of them voted for Clinton, but 300,000 African Americans who were eligible to vote didn’t vote; 153,000 black voters in Michigan who came out for Obama in 2008 stayed home in 2016. Clinton lost Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes, and 400,000 African Americans who were eligible to vote didn’t cast ballots. In Arizona, the margin was 91,000 votes, and 600,000 Latinos who were eligible to vote were not mobilized to the polls…Lisa Garcia Bedolla, who literally wrote the book on Latino politics, has called for an affordable, effective, and sophisticated voter-engagement infrastructure she calls the Civic Web. The model is to use direct voter contact and long-term relationship building driven by neighborhood-based teams who work year-round in their communities with a universe of 100 people per team leader. The civic-web model would cost about $3 million to move 100,000 voters. By those metrics, margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona could more than have been closed at a fraction of the cost of what was spent on television ads…In 2017, progressives can lay the foundation for the expansion of civic engagement of those voters who have shown the greatest propensity for supporting Democrats (74 percent of people of color supported Clinton; 80.5 percent for Obama). The way to do this is by targeting local races in strategic states whose demographics are trending in a progressive direction.”   These are good ideas, but the argument that Democrats can create a stable majority of the electorate without getting at least a healthier share of white working-class voters was largely discredited on November 8th.

Even though Hillary Clinton lost neartly all of the southern states, Georgia has emerged as the next likely major ‘purple’ state, where she lost by a smaller margin, 5 percent, than her defeat margins in both Ohio (8.6 percent) and Iowa (9.6 percent). Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution  has the best update on Democratic prospects in the Peach State so far. Bluestein notes, “Minority voters make up about 40 percent of the state’s electorate, but they don’t pack the same punch at the polls. Case in point: Fewer than half of registered African-American men cast ballots this year. The voter registration group [House Minority Leader Stacey] Abrams started, the New Georgia Project, aims to persuade 800,000 unregistered minority Georgians to sign up to vote by 2024. She said the party will focus next year on boosting funding for schools in poverty-stricken areas and continue to push for the expansion of Medicaid – two issues popular with the party’s base.”

“A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Wednesday found Democratic and independent voters lukewarm on a handful of party leaders and most excited for “someone entirely new,” reports Eli Watkins at CNN: “Just over 22% of respondents said Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s failed candidate in the 2016 election, would excite them, while almost 15% said her running in 2020 would “make no difference” and about 62% said she should not run…Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders both fared about twice as well as Clinton, but still failed to elicit excitement from a majority of respondents…After publicly toying with the idea of running in 2020, Biden said he had no intention to do so. If he were to run and win, the current vice president would be 78 years old at the time of taking office. Sanders would be 79, and Trump would be 74…Meanwhile, about a third of respondents said they would be excited by a 2020 bid from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren…”

“Governor’s races aren’t the sexiest in politics, but it’s hard to overstate how important the seven listed below are. They won’t just chart the future of their states; they also may determine whether Democrats can get back on their feet in Congress and in key state legislatures at any point in the next 15 years. Democrats estimate they could pick up as many as 10 or more seats in the House of Representatives if they can have a say in post-2020 redistricting, and they’ve launched a new redistricting effort aided by President Obama to try to make that happen…“I truly believe that if we don’t win these states races — particularly governors’ races — in 2018, we are going to have another decade of lost Democratic leaders,” said Elisabeth Pearson, the executive director of the Democratic Governors’ Association.” – From “The Democratic Party’s future could be on the line in 7 hugely important governor’s races” by Ambder Phillips and Aaron Blake at The Fix.

At Governing the States and Localities, Mike Maciag writes: “A study conducted by Portland State University tallied voter turnout in the most recent mayoral elections in the 30 largest cities. It found that residents 65 years and older were a median of seven times more likely to vote than those ages 18 to 34, who frequently registered turnout rates in the single digits. “There’s an enormous disconnect with younger citizens in understanding the impact that local governments have,” says Phil Keisling, director of the university’s Center for Public Service. “They’re ceding to their grandparents the political decisions.”

In her post “Why the white working class votes against itself,” WaPo’s Catherine Rampell outs the strong undercurrent of bigoted racial stereotypes that many Trump voters embraced: “...A recent YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that Trump voters are five times more likely to believe that “average Americans” have gotten less than they deserve in recent years than to believe that “blacks” have gotten less than they deserve. (African Americans don’t count as “average Americans,” apparently.)…We’ve known for a long time, through the work of Martin Gilens, Suzanne Mettler and other social scientists, that Americans (A) generally associate government spending with undeserving, nonworking, nonwhite people; and (B) are really bad at recognizing when they personally benefit from government programs.”

You probably have a better chance of winning the powerball jackpot than Trump not being inaugurated, but the effort to persuade 37 of the 305 members of the Electoral College who are expected to vote for  Trump to ditch him has intensified impressively. Thus far, only one elector has announced his intention of switching his vote. But, in his Washington Post article, “In last-shot bid, thousands urge electoral college to block Trump at Monday vote,” Robert Samuels provides some interesting observations on the topic, including “Amid the uncertainty caused by Russian influence, 10 electors — nine Democrats and one Republican — asked for an intelligence briefing to get more information about Moscow’s role.” However, adds Samuels, “No one knows for sure how many are considering alternate votes; estimates vary from one to 25.” One elector cited by Samuels is getting 50 letters a day and 3000 emails.

Right on time, Trump has just presented his 305 electors with yet another reason to switch their vote, well-encapsulated in the Washington Post headline “China said it would return a seized U.S. naval drone. Trump told them to ‘keep it.’ As the authors, Missy Ryan and Emily Rauhala report, Trump’s Saturday night tweet “We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!” adds to growing doubts about his commitment to America’s national security. “The comment could prolong one of the most serious incidents between the U.S. and Chinese militaries in recent memory,” write  Rauhala and Trump, “potentially complicating ties ahead of Trump’s inauguration.” They cite a mocking editorial from Beijing’s The Global Times, “Before Trump’s generous announcement that he didn’t want the drone back, the Pentagon had already announced publicly that they have asked China to return the ‘illegally seized’ [unmanned underwater vehicle] through appropriate governmental channels,”

Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip meddling in the incident may have actually provoked the drone seizure, reports Paulina Firozi at The Hill: “Some have suggested that China’s initial seizure of the drone was a response to the president-elect’s phone call with Taiwan’s leader earlier this month…Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen have both downplayed the significance of the conversation, but China formally protested the call, which broke with decades of U.S. protocol.”

WaPo’s political reporter Dan Balz also has some serious questions about Trump’s competence and commitment to defend U.S. national security, which the electors ought to consider: “…If standing up to Russian attempts to interfere with American democracy isn’t a foundational principle of an “America first” policy, what is? Trump’s response has suggested a different focus and different philosophy, one that might be described as “Trump first,” rather than “America first.” His instincts appear to be aimed at shielding himself…On top of all this is the president-elect’s apparent lack of interest in receiving daily intelligence briefings, a standard procedure for presidents. That raises questions about how he plans to conduct foreign policy. Will he seek all available evidence as he weighs decisions? Whom will he listen to and trust? And will he ever have a trusting relationship with the vast intelligence-gathering resources at his command?”

It’s not gonna happen because the request has been denied, but a “Majority Want Monday’s Electoral College Vote Postponed In Wake Of Russia Scandal: New Poll,” notes HuffPo Washington, D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim. “A majority of American voters favor delaying the December 19th Electoral College vote until electors can be fully briefed on Russian interference in the election, according to a new poll conducted by YouGov.  The survey, sponsored by the progressive advocacy group Avaaz, found 52 percent of people supportive of stalling the vote, set to take place Monday…A surprisingly high number of people ― 46 percent ― were also willing to support so-called “faithless electors,” the name given members of the Electoral College who spurn the vote of their home state and vote for a different candidate instead…Some states mandate that electors vote the way their state instructs, but the the 10th Circuit Court ruled late on Friday that such laws are unconstitutional.”

The hope that the Electoral College will elect Hillary Clinton president is even less likely to be fulfilled  than Trump being denied the presidency. But Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a former Democratic presidential candidate, nonetheless makes a compelling case for Trump electors switching to Clinton, as the winner of the popular vote by a margin approaching 3 million. “…There is an especially good reason for them [the presidential electors] not to nullify what the people have said — the fundamental principle of one person, one vote. We are all citizens equally. Our votes should count equally. And since nothing in our Constitution compels a decision otherwise, the electors should respect the equal vote by the people by ratifying it on Dec. 19…The framers left the electors free to choose. They should exercise that choice by leaving the election as the people decided it: in Clinton’s favor.”

In an MSNBC interview by Chuck Todd, Lessig raised eyebrows with his claim that 20-30 electors have indicated an interest in switching votes away from Trump. Lessig has created an organization, “Elector’s Trust, which “provides free and strictly confidential legal support to any Elector who wishes to vote their conscience…The Electors Trust will defend your right to exercise your “independent and nonpartisan judgment.”…We will defend you against any fines or legal claims that might threaten the freedom of your vote…If you are an Elector, we will also allow you to know how many others like you there are. How many, not who. Because we will never reveal any Elector’s views, to anyone, ever…If you’re a conscientious Elector, and you’d like advice or support, send an email to ElectorsTrust@durietangri.com. Your name, email address and any other personal information will be kept strictly confidential.”

At Vox, however, Andrew Prokop’s “The last-ditch push for the Electoral College to stop Trump, explained” throws a load of ice-water on the whole project: “…This particular batch of electors is highly unlikely to defect from Trump because of who they are — generally, they’re Republican Party stalwarts or activists chosen during state party deliberations, as the excellent Politico feature “The People Who Pick the President” makes clear. Almost always, the parties do a good enough job of vetting their respective electoral slates to ensure that they will indeed loyally back their party’s presidential nominee. And while some Trump skeptics are electors, the vast majority of them have said they’d affirm the results in their states.” And, even in the unlikley event that the election was thrown into the House — the most probable  scenario if 37 Trump electors defect — odds are the house would pick Trump anyway, since most House Republicans have already lined up to kiss his ring.

Getting real, the best argument for continuing to encourage Trump electors to switch is to further undermine his case for a “mandate.” Not that it would influence Trump’s decision-making, such as it is. But it can’t hurt to remind congress that there is considerable doubt about his policies and judgement, even among his electors, and congress has a responsibility to check his worst ideas and limit the damage he does to America’s future. Still, there shouldn’t be much doubt among those who take the trouble to actually read the “Hamilton Electors” credo in The Federalist Papers: #68 that the best purpose of the Electoral College is to deny someone so manifestly unfit the power to run our government, and we have never had a better reason to use it for exactly that reason. That it won’t be so applied when it is most needed clinches the argument that the Electoral College should be abolished in favor of dirtect, popular election of the President of the United States.

In his nationally-syndicated column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides the best argument thus far for the Electoral College rejecting Trump’s victory claim: “Memo to the electoral college that votes next Monday: Our tradition — for good reason — tells you that your job is to ratify the state-by-state outcome of the election. The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the system…One passage from Federalist 68 seems eerily relevant to the present circumstance. Hamilton wrote that the electors could be a barrier against “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” Hamilton asked: “How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”…The CIA’s finding that Russia actively intervened in our election to make Trump president is an excellent reason for the electors to consider whether they should exercise their independent power. At the very least, they should be briefed on what the CIA knows, and in particular on whether there is any evidence that Trump or his lieutenants were engaged with Russia during the campaign….Trump himself said in July of Clinton’s emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” By publicly inviting a foreign power to intervene in our election, Trump put himself ahead of the nation’s interest in holding an election that would be untainted by foreign meddling. It is one of many reasons conscientious electors might decide that Trump is unfit to be president and may even be a danger to the country”

Conservative columnist Katheen Parker agrees that the Electoral College should dump Trump for a litany of good reasons. But she urges “Republican electors to defect — not to cede the election to Hillary Clinton but to join with Democrats in selecting a compromise candidate, such as Mitt Romney or John Kasich. It wouldn’t be that hard to do.”

“Democrats at Crossroads: Win Back Working-Class Whites, or Let Them Go?” by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at The New York Times could have given more consideration to the non-binary strategic option. True, there are Democrats who argue for writing off the white working-class, and those who say, no, Dems must focus on winning them back. But other Democratic strategists don’t see it as an either-or choice, arguing instead that winning just a modest segment of this large demographic group could secure a stable Democratic majority in the years ahead. In addition to more inclusive messaging to get at least a larger cross-section of working-class whites, a follow-up article probing the possibilities of targeting a sub-segment of the white working class (e.g. seniors, rural voters or unionized workers) might be interesting.

Dahlia Lithwick and David S. Cohen have a NYT op-ed, “Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans,” which makes a compelling case that the Democratic Party has accepted Trump’s Electoral College victory claim way too easily. The op-ed includes several provocative observations, among them: “There’s no shortage of legal theories that could challenge Mr. Trump’s anointment, but they come from outsiders rather than the Democratic Party. Impassioned citizens have been pleading with electors to vote against Mr. Trump; law professors have argued that winner-take-all laws for electoral votes are unconstitutional; a small group, the Hamilton Electors, is attempting to free electors to vote their consciences; and a new theory has arisen that there is legal precedent for courts to give the election to Mrs. Clinton based on Russian interference. All of these efforts, along with the grass-roots protests, boycotts and petitions, have been happening without the Democratic Party. The most we’ve seen is a response to the C.I.A. revelations, but only with Republicans onboard to give Democrats bipartisan cover…Contrast the Democrats’ do-nothingness to what we know the Republicans would have done. If Mr. Trump had lost the Electoral College while winning the popular vote, an army of Republican lawyers would have descended on the courts and local election officials. The best of the Republican establishment would have been filing lawsuits and infusing every public statement with a clear pronouncement that Donald Trump was the real winner. And they would have started on the morning of Nov. 9, using the rhetoric of patriotism and courage.”

In her Washington Post column, “How to mount a progressive resistance,” Katrina vanden Heuval provides an inspiring account of reform campaigns across the nation at the state and local level, which offer hope to those who are discouraged by Trump’s Electoral College majority. Vanden Heuval concludes that “Trump, of course, still can wreak havoc, stripping millions of health care, trashing America’s leadership role in addressing climate change, unleashing a new lawless era of crony capitalism and sowing division rather than decency. But even with Republicans in control of Congress, neither he nor his Cabinet of bankers, billionaires and generals will have a free hand. Resistance will come, not only in the streets but also from leaders in states and cities who are intent on making America better.”

More rays of hope — and an excellent action agenda for Democrats — from “The voting rights manifesto: a state-by-state plan to defend democracy,” a Vox post by Daniel Nichanian: “As Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections has documented, automatic voting proposals can be directly submitted to voters in at least 20 states. This process has already started in Nevada, where activists affiliated with the organization iVote collected enough signatures to force the Nevada legislature to consider AVR in the upcoming legislative session. (Either the legislature adopts the reform or else the issue is placed on the November 2018 ballot for voters to decide.)…At this moment, Democrats only fully control the governments of six states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, and Rhode Island). But plenty remains to be done even there. Some of these states allow no early voting, allow no weekend voting, and fail to automatically register citizens — and hundreds of thousands of people with felony convictions are disenfranchised within them…Democrats are also well positioned to take control of many state governments in 2017 and 2018 (Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, and Washington, to name the most notable). Where and when they do, it is crucial that they be ready to act decisively and unflinchingly — not just to roll back recently introduced restrictions but also to increase access to the franchise and remove longstanding obstacles to electoral participation.” Read the whole thing. There’s more here worth doing.

From Democratic strategist Guy Cecil’s responses on the topic of “How Democrats can win again” in an interview byChris Cillizza at The Fix: “We can be a party that stands up — fiercely and strongly — against racism and still support expanding economic opportunities for all Americans.  We can be a party that supports my marriage to my husband, and one who supports the groundbreaking work being done by building trade unions who invest in worker training. We can support the DREAMers worried about their future in America and the dreams of poor whites who have been screwed by big business, big agriculture, and in many ways, their own government…Our party has become too focused on the presidential race, to the detriment on local and state races…We have competitive governor’s races across the country and many winnable majorities in state legislatures…The Democratic National Committee is part of the solution, but they are insufficient to turning around state parties, most of which are in disrepair…The way to win is not to become a liberal version of Trump, mired in division and hatred. More darkness in our political process will only lead to despair. It is time for activism, passion, protests, righteous anger and moral clarity. It is also time for more light.”

Eric Lipton and Scott Shane focus on some of the damage done down-ballot in their NYT article, “Democratic House Candidates Were Also Targets of Russian Hacking.” The report includes a chilling description of the reaction of one Republican blogger to a Russian leak by “Guccifer 2.0” of thousands of pages of documents stolen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee: “I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”

Incumbency rules even more now, report Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley at Crystal Ball: “This election cycle, 393 of 435 House representatives, 29 of 34 senators, and five of 12 governors sought reelection (several of the governors were prohibited from seeking another term). Of those, 380 of 393 House members (97%), 27 of 29 senators (93%), and four of five governors (80%) won another term. These members of Congress and governors not only won renomination, but also won in November….Those reelection rates are all a little bit better than the already impressive post-World War II averages…”

From Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s column on “The Tainted Election“: “Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?…And it wouldn’t have been seen as a marginal victory, either. Even as it was, Mrs. Clinton received almost three million more votes than her opponent, giving her a popular margin close to that of George W. Bush in 2004…And when, as you know will happen, the administration begins treating criticism as unpatriotic, the answer should be: You have to be kidding. Mr. Trump is, by all indications, the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power. And his critics are the people who lack patriotism?…Everything we’ve seen so far says that Mr. Trump is going to utterly betray the interests of the white working-class voters who were his most enthusiastic supporters, stripping them of health care and retirement security, and this betrayal should be highlighted.”

The New York Times editorial “Russia’s Hand in America’s Election” puts it this way: “Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, made it clear her administration would redouble efforts to punish and isolate Moscow for war crimes in Syria’s civil war and its aggression toward Ukraine and other neighbors. “I’ve stood up to Russia,” Ms. Clinton said during a debate in the fall. “I’ve taken Putin on and I would do that as president…New disclosures by American officials now reveal that intelligence agencies concluded with “high confidence” that a desire to undermine American faith in the electoral system morphed into an effort to hurt Mrs. Clinton’s chances…Revelations about Russian involvement will loom over many of Mr. Trump’s decisions, including his likely choice to lead the State Department, Rex Tillerson. Mr. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has cultivated a close and profitable relationship with Mr. Putin and has criticized American sanctions against Russia.”

He don’t need no stinkin’ “Daily Brief.” NYT’s David E. Sanger quotes Trump: “You know, I’m, like, a smart person,” he said. “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.” I can’t decide whether it’s my more paranoid or lucid moments that lead to the conclusion that the GOP is now scheming to give us 11 plus years of President Pence.

We’ve gotten used to Trump reversing his stated positions, often witin hours. But E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s syndicated column, “Trump can’t wait to sell out his base” flags the astonishing speed with which Trump has begun selling out the constituency that gave him the largest share of his Electoral College victory. “Donald Trump cast himself as the champion of a besieged American working class and a defender of its interests. His early decisions tell us something very different: This could be the most anti-worker, anti-union crowd to run our government since the Gilded Age…In Trump’s case, we’re learning that rhetoric out of labor songbooks meant less than nothing. He was covering up an agenda focused on undercutting legal protections for workers and weakening their already-beleaguered organizations.”

Interesting title choice for The New York Times article, “Democrats Hone a New Message: It’s the Economy, Everyone” by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin. The subtextual message is “yes, the economy is still the key issue for Democrats who want to win elections, but let’s lose the “stupid” part and try to appeal to everyone.” Forget for a minute that the ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was addressed more to the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign workers. Tweak the slogan to refocus Democratic messaging on reminding all voters of the central importance of economic justice and reform. That’s what got lost in the 2016 presidential campaign. The rest of the article deals more with centrist and liberal Democratic leaders re-emphasizing the importance of the economy. That’s the strategy that must be firmly in place by the 2018 mid terms and beyond.

WaPo’s Chris Cillizza makes a painful, though salient point in his article “Trump has completely upended the political game. We need to adjust accordingly.” As Cillizza writes, “Trump, to his immense credit, understood that a) flouting the rules actually endeared him to a big swath of voters and b) there just might not be any real rules at all…Trump took every rule of the game and not just broke it but smashed it.” We may be entering a new era of guerilla politics, or at least political jiu jitsu. While the conditions that facilitated Trump’s Electoral College win can’t be replicated, Dems should at least take note of Cillizza’s point that “…everything that we — the collective political horde — thought was conclusive about how you win an election (outspend your opponent, build a better organization, lead in polling, run more TV ads) was disproved in one fell swoop on Nov. 8.”

At Daily Kos “Trump is laying the path for Democrats to reconsolidate the Blue Wall” by Egberto Willies provides a succinct summation of the present predicament facing Dems: “Democrats lost a big chunk of the blue wall because they took many of the reliably Democratic states for granted. They did not do so by having policies inferior to those of the Republicans: they did so by allowing Donald Trump to define the policies he purported to support, letting him highlight past Democratic policies anathema to the working class, and by giving him the win in the domains of social media and electronic media…He won the presidency because of a constitutional aberration intended to ensure a corrupt power structure the ability to override the will of the people. The Bill of Rights protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. The Electoral College is the the constitutional device of the powerful minority to usurp the will of the majority…With his cabinet selections, Donald Trump is providing tremendous opportunities to show that he conned those who placed their faith in him. His thin skin, including his Twitter feuds with some who helped elect him, creates a metastasis of buyer’s remorse that we must capitalize on immediately.”

Looking toward the 2018 mid-term elections ad strategy, it may be instructive to look at the last mid-terms (2014) to see where Democrats and Republicans placed their TV ads. Jeremy Scott Diamond’s Bloomberg post,  “TV’s Most Republican and Democratic Shows” provides an eyebrow-raiser in that regard. Hover your mouse over each of the TV programs to compare the numbers, and you may be surprised that the most popular Democratic choice by far, was “Judge Judy” with 19,425 ads, followed by “The Peoples’ Court” with 6,092, a distant second. For Republicans, the “Local News” blew everything else away, with 24,252 spots, followed by “The Price is Right” with 9,874 ads. You would have to study viewer demographics of each show to be sure. But, overall, it looks like Dems were focused on turning out the base in their ad choices, while Republicans were more interested in reaching out a bit wider.

Viet Than Nguyen’s NYT op-ed “Trump Is a Great Storyteller. We Need to Be Better,” provides a worthy messaging challenge for Democrats. Nguyen explains: “…The contest for our American identity wasn’t strictly a political affair. It is also a matter of storytelling. Those who seek to lead our country must persuade the people through their ability to tell a story about who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. The struggle over the direction of our country is also a fight over whose words will win and whose images will ignite the collective imagination…Donald J. Trump won barely, and by the grace of the Electoral College. His voters responded to his call to “Make America Great Again,” referring to a past when jobs were more plentiful, incomes more stable and politicians more bold…That kind of nostalgia is powerful and visceral, but it’s hard to ignore the subtext.”

If anyone still harbored hopes that Trump would be a bipartisan maverick, his extremist cabinet picks thus far indicate that we can now let go of any remaining delusions in that regard, or that he gives a damn about unifying Americans. With the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the E.P.A., it sure looks like Steve Bannon is now the puppet-master pulling Trump’s strings, and Jared Kushner’s role has been reduced to technical support. The nomination of big oil errand boy Pruitt has a nasty, in-your-face quality that points to the hissing ideologues in Trump’s den, including Bannon and Sessions.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out the Romney at State buzz was just a distraction to provide temporary cover for the hard right cabinet set-up, not too dissimilar from the way they just played Al Gore. Alternatively, Romney might serve as a suitably obedient parrot to distract from the rest of Trump’s cabinet picks. If so, that could come soon, to quell rising protest against Pruitt.

And if this keeps up, the comings and goings at the White House could look like outtakes from “Seven Days in May.”

Classy, that “pro” wrestling should serve as an exemplary business in the Trump Administration.

The chart below comes from “Which was the most accurate national poll in the 2016 presidential election?” by John Sides at The Monkey Cage:

From Thomas E. Patterson’s report, “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters” at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, via Erik Wemple’s “Study: Clinton-Trump coverage was a feast of false equivalency” at The Washington Post: “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused. Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position…There wasn’t much in Clinton’s general election news coverage that worked in her favor….Stories about her personal traits portrayed her as overly cautious and guarded and ran 3-to-1 negative. News reports on her policy positions trended negative by a ratio of 4-to-1. Everything from her position on health care to her position on trade was criticized, often in the form of an attack by Trump or another opponent. Her record of public service, which conceivably should have been a source of positive press, turned out differently. News reports on that topic were 62 percent negative to 38 percent positive, with Trump having a larger voice than she did in defining the meaning of her career. He was widely quoted as saying, “She’s been there 30 years and has nothing to show for it.”

Talk about irony, “According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith…To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump.” — As  reported by David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy.

At The Fix Aaron Blake rolls out the reasons why gimmicky ploys to place Merrick Garland on the U.S. Supreme Court just before the new Congress is sworn in are Not Gonna Happen. In addition, it’s hard to imagine a staid, respected jurist like Garland offering himself up as the guinea pig for such an unprecedented gambit, and it’s also out of character for President Obama. If there was a workable, though controversial, way to place Garland on the court, it would be morally justifiable, since the Republicans have shamelessly betrayed America’s ideals by refusing to even hold hearings on Obama’s nominee. Unfortunately, the schemes Blake describes have too many moving parts, and could backfire badly.

Bring it, please bring it.

As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, an argument blaming any one factor exclusively for an election outcome is generally a dicey proposition. There may be rare exceptions but, election upsets, in particular, are usually a function of a combination of events, gaffes, demographic trends, voting laws, media bias, approval ratings, turn-out mobilization and even the weather, to name just some of the most commonly-cited factors.

You can blame the F.B.I. director’s partisan meddling, as did the Clinton campaign, for the 2016 outcome. But you can also blame younger voters, white working-class anger and racially-driven voter suppression. And it’s possible to marshall compelling statistics for all of these arguments. If any one of them can explain Trump’s electoral college victory, however, then it can’t be only one of them.

But if you held me hostage, twisted my arm and threatened to take away my beer for a year unless I came up with a single cause of Clinton’s Electoral College defeat, I would have to go with distracted messaging.

Compare for a moment the respective slogans of the Trump and Clinton campaigns, “Make America Great Again” and “Stronger Together.” Both are yawners, to some extent, in that neither has any rhetorical music to it. But Trump’s message at least articulates a clearly-stated goal, and one that resonates if you live in a declining Rust Belt community. “Stronger Together” — not much of a goal or direction there, just a nod to some vague vision of unity in pursuit of…something.

Nor did the Clinton campaign’s “I’m with her” buttons win any hearts and minds. Anyone who wore that button was going to vote for Clinton anyway, zero value added. Worse, some fence-sitters may have read it as “I’m with her…and you’re not,” a counter-productive message of exclusion.

Slogans aren’t everything. The candidate is the ultimate messenger and what she or he projects on the stump, in interviews, comments, photo-ops, tweets and ads are even more important than the slogans. Here again the Clinton campaign was bested. Much of the reason is shallow media coverage. With few exceptions, the press amplified everything Trump said, and pretty much smothered Clinton’s statements and policy positions with her opponent’s outrages du jour. Trump played the media like a fiddle.

Let’s never forget, however, that Clinton actually won the popular vote by 2.5 million, and she banked  more total votes than any other presidential candidate in history. Nitpicking about messaging in light of that reality seems a little unfair. It’s faulting her for not winning by 3 million votes, instead of a measley 2.5. But the presidenial election is really 10 or 12 different elections, thanks to the Electoral College, and that’s where the Clinton campaign was outfoxed. Somebody in the Trump campaign, perhaps Bannon, saw the path through the Rust Belt and the power of sleeper issues, like offshoring jobs.

Credit the Trump campaign also with relentless branding of Clinton as elitist, even though she has been a tireless supporter of disadvantaged people and progressive reforms all of her life. Trump’s bio-narrative, on the other hand, defines the lifestyle of the self-serving billionaire who never performed an act of public service.

Clinton had by far the more credible economic policies, in terms of helping blue collar and middle class voters. But she couldn’t get any coverage or traction for them. I don’t place much stock in the argument that Clinton couldn’t sell her progressive policies because she got big speaking fees from the likes of Goldman-Sachs. If most voters cared about that, why wouldn’t they care about Trump’s routine stiffing of his subcontractors in his business and his ridiculously gilded lifestyle, while he masqueraded as a champion of working people?

The Trump campaign’s media exploitation and message discipline were impressive. They milked the power of sheer repetition to the fullest and stayed on their message. Clinton had to respond to Trump’s outrageous statements and revelations about his abuse of women. As the first female candidate, she couldn’t just ignore it. There was so much of it that her economic messages were dwarfed and got scant coverage. Her campaign could have focused more on economic messaging in her ads, however.

The next Democratic presidential candidate must not get distracted from projecting a message and vision of broadly-shared economic opportunity. A rigorous, disciplined, all-inclusive message supporting economic progress for working families of all races is the path to victory for the next Democratic president, and down-ballot Dems ought to embrace it as well.

“The problem for the Democratic Party is not that its policies aren’t progressive or populist enough,” writes Fareed Zakaria in a Washington Post op-ed. “They are already progressive and are substantially more populist than the Republican Party’s on almost every dimension. And yet, over the past decade, Republicans have swept through statehouses, governors’ mansions, Congress and now the White House. Democrats need to understand not just the Trump victory but that broader wave…Hillary Clinton’s campaign, for instance, should have been centered around one simple theme: that she grew up in a town outside Chicago and lived in Arkansas for two decades. The subliminal message to working-class whites would have been “I know you. I am you.” It was the theme of her husband’s speech introducing her at the Democratic convention, and Bill Clinton’s success has a lot to do with the fact that, brilliant as he is, he can always remind those voters that he knows them. Once reassured, they are then open to his policy ideas.”

In his salon.com post, “Want to win the working-class vote? Try progressive economic policies, Democrats,” Sean McElwee notes “Clinton’s campaign erred by not running more ads criticizing Trump’s predatory behavior toward workers and touting the Obama administration’s auto-industry bailout. (Research suggests that in battleground states only 6 percent of Clinton’s campaign ads mentioned “jobs,” while 43 percent of Trump’s did.)…At this point, the key limitation to progressive economic policies isn’t message but mobilization. There are numerous opportunities to run progressive candidates in races and states that Democrats have ignored. As the data suggest, economic progressivism is popular. Now let’s get the people who benefit from it mobilized. Let’s get candidates who can run on those platforms and win…”

Podcaster Lincoln Mitchell’s “Six Things Democrats Can Do Now To Combat Trumpism” has some provocative talking points, including these three: Spend time in working class white communities; Don’t talk about public service and sacrifice (“Every time a Democratic politician uses this language-and Hillary Clinton did a lot-it is a reminder of the elitism of the Party, and the candidate.”); and Don’t be afraid to tweet.

At The New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin pinpoints “THE REAL VOTING SCANDAL OF 2016: Jill Stein can’t call for the recount of uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of voter-suppression measures.” Noting that recounts “almost never result in a change of more than five hundred votes,” Toobin writes,  “This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots…In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots…In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012. To put it another way, Clinton received forty-three thousand fewer votes in that county than Barack Obama did—a number that is nearly double Trump’s margin of victory in all of Wisconsin. The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election.”

“Donald Trump hasn’t released his tax returns — but Democrats want to force his Cabinet picks to do so,” reports Ed O’Keefe at The Washington Post. “Currently, just three Senate committees — the Budget, Finance, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panels — have the authority to require Cabinet picks to release their tax returns. The others do not…Democrats see an opportunity to call attention to Trump’s refusal to release tax information despite public opinion polls showing that most Americans believe he should.” The move would also underscore the reality of heavy Wall St. influence in Trump’s cabinet picks.

In the latest installment of the Blame Game, Aaron Blake’s post, “Yes, you can blame millennials for Hillary Clinton’s loss” at The Fix should have had a subhead “Along with most other groups.” Blake is dead right that younger voters ditched Clinton in significantly disproportionate and damaging numbers. But they had plenty of company. As John Judis noted in a November 11th Post op-ed, however, “According to national exit polls, among Latino voters she fell six points from President Obama’s numbers in 2012; she dropped five points each among 18-to-29-year-olds, unmarried women and African Americans. Together, these groups made up the same percentage of the electorate in 2016 as they had in 2012. Some of the battleground-state figures are even more striking. In Ohio, Clinton was 13 points behind Obama among 18-to-29-year-olds. In New Mexico, she fell 11 points among Latinos.”

At CNN Politics Eugene Scott probes the damage done by Hillary Clinton’s “Deplorables” gaffe, and notes, “On a special assignment from the Clinton campaign, Diane Hessan studied how undecided voters were responding to the campaign…She wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe sharing reflections from her study, which showed the reaction to the “deplorables” was stronger than when FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress saying they were probing to see if additional emails on the laptop of one her top aides could have an impact on a closed investigation to Clinton’s use of a primary email server.” I believe it. There’s no data to back it up, but google “deplorables t-shirt,” then click on the “images” tab,  and you will get about 200 designs to chose from.

You’ve probably heard about the daunting political landscape Democrats will be facing in the 2018 mid term elections, when Dems will be defending 25 seats, compared to 8 for Republicans. But shouldn’t Dems expect some pick-ups in the House, where all incumbents are running and Republicans will have the presidency? Not exactly, writes Charlie Cook at The Cook Political Report: “In the House there seems to be very little volat­il­ity in 2018. Cook Polit­ic­al Re­port House Ed­it­or Dav­id Wasser­man es­tim­ates that there are about ten Re­pub­lic­ans sit­ting in dis­tricts car­ried by Hil­lary Clin­ton and just eight Demo­crats in dis­tricts won by Don­ald Trump. The party hold­ing the White House usu­ally loses House seats in midterm elec­tions, but that might not hap­pen this time. First, the House of­ten ex­per­i­ences a surge and de­cline phe­nomen­on in which a party picks up a bunch of seats with its White House vic­tory only to lose many of those seats in the next mid-term elec­tion. But this year Re­pub­lic­ans won the Pres­id­ency while los­ing House seats, so they aren’t go­ing in­to the midterm with a lot of new seats to de­fend. Second, Demo­crats de­pend on young­er and minor­ity voters, who are most likely to sit out midterm elec­tion years.”

“It was the party’s neoliberalism that did it in,” writes Jeff Faux at The American Prospect. “…Organized labor, for all its flaws, kept the white working class in the Democratic Party, and was a firewall against white racism. This was especially true for industrial unions…as industrial unions declined, the right wing punched through that firewall, firing up anger towards elites, whose definition of diversity and equality did not seem to include white “losers…The Democrats’ task ahead, therefore, is to return to their own roots as the party of the new working class, whose anxieties about the future are spilling over the walls that separate people of different colors, genders, sexual preferences—and even educations.”